


Counting Heartbeats

by mnwood



Category: The Old Guard (Comics), The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: (Obviously), Bottom Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani, Cuddling & Snuggling, Domestic Bliss, Established Relationship, Existential Angst, Flashbacks, Fluff and Angst, Immortal Husbands Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, Immortality, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani is an Incurable Romantic, M/M, POV Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani, Post-Coital Cuddling, Religion, Romantic Angst, Romantic Fluff, Temporary Character Death, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-08
Updated: 2020-08-08
Packaged: 2021-03-05 21:20:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,748
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25741987
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mnwood/pseuds/mnwood
Summary: During the time it takes Nicky to come back to life after an accidental death, Joe thinks back on their 900 years together.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 28
Kudos: 282





	Counting Heartbeats

It hurts every time. 

The waiting, the tattoo of his heartbeat growing stronger and faster the longer the wait as a tangible reminder that all hearts permanently stop beating eventually.

This time is very stupid. 

Joe and Nicky were just eating a lovely dinner together in one of their safe houses when Nicky laughed at something Joe had said and subsequently began choking on the food Joe had cooked. Joe, of course, tried to save him, but it was a fluke accident that inevitably ended in Nicky’s death.

Joe counts the rhythm of his heartbeat as he waits. He holds Nicky’s head in his lap on the floor and strokes his thumb across his reddened cheek and hums a soft tune as he counts.

The first time Nicky had died was clear in Joe’s memory, because he had been the one to kill him and watching a man come back to life is not something easily forgotten (at least, not the first time). Joe thought he was just imagining things, until Nicky stabbed him through the chest and Joe experienced the nothingness himself, the unquantifiable dark emptiness of nonexistence before he impossibly breathed himself back to life and killed Nicky again. And again and again and again until other soldiers began to take notice, and there was a moment of understanding, a moment of looking into each other’s eyes for the first time not as enemies but as allies, and they fled together, wordlessly, into hiding because they knew that they were the same and that they were different.

They learned each other's languages patiently and painstakingly, and for a while they spoke a combination of Arabic and Ligurian, oftentimes switching mid-sentence and then switching right back. Once they could fully understand each other, the first real conversation they had was about what it felt like to die.

“Did you see what you were fighting for? Heaven?” Joe asked.

Nicky shook his head and smiled, his eyes cast down thoughtfully at the ground of the cave they were holed up in. “There was nothing. Every time. Nothing.”

“And when you wake, it feels like no time has passed, and that all of time has passed.”

Nicky laughed and nodded his head. “Yes. Exactly.” He looked at Joe, considering. “What we were fighting for is meaningless.”

“Your religion? Maybe. The god you worship, did he rise from the dead?”

“He did. Perhaps he was like us.”

“So does that mean he was a man, or that we are gods?”

Nicky laughed again. Joe quickly discovered that he liked that small, quiet laugh and that he liked being the one to cause that laugh. 

It made sense, in their own little pocket of the universe, when Joe kissed Nicky for the first time. They had been living together, hiding together, running together for a year, maybe two, and they had met Andy and had some questions answered while others continued to pile up, but meeting her put things into perspective. They had an inherent bond with her, of course, but it was different than the bond they had with each other. Until they met Andy, they believed their bond was born primarily out of having the same affliction, but Joe remembered recognizing right away that he would never feel for Andy what he felt for Nicky, that the intensity of his affections were reserved for one person only. And he could feel it, too, without ever having talked about it, that Nicky felt the same. Their love began easily, with gentle touches and secret kisses, and it was altogether thrilling and scary, monumental and simple, and even if they had had just one lifetime together instead of a hundred, Joe would still feel like the luckiest man alive.

The next time Nicky had died was also clear in Joe’s memory, because he loved him, he loved him, he loved him, and he watched the light extinguish from his eyes, and Andy was there with a firm hand on Joe's shoulder, holding him back and yelling in his ear, _Nicolo will come back, keep fighting!_ But it did not stop his heart from hammering furiously in his chest until Nicky came back. That time, Joe felt before he saw; the beat of his heart evened out before he even saw that Nicky was alive. His heart knew.

“When I die, do you feel it?” Joe asked Nicky, one night when everything was still new, when they still felt young and years still felt like years instead of minutes, when they had been together for a single year and it felt like a significant amount of time, a collection of moments, of firsts, to hold and cherish for the long future ahead of them. “Do you feel the pain?”

Nicky was on his back, Joe curled under his arm with his head resting on his chest. He could feel Nicky’s heart beating softly beneath him. “Of course I do,” Nicky replied.

“We began together, do you think we’ll…?”

Nicky squeezed Joe closer against his side. “‘Began,’ is that what you call it? I think of it as being born together.”

“You didn’t answer my question, love.”

“You know I don’t like thinking about it.”

“Humor me.” Joe lifted his head to press a kiss to the underside of Nicky’s jaw. “Please,” he mumbled against his neck.

Nicky huffed a laugh. “I sometimes wonder if it’s not the time that matters but the number of times we die. Maybe Andromache is still alive because she has only been killed 200 times, and maybe on the 300th time she will not come back. If it takes many millennia for that many deaths to occur, then she will live for many millennia.”

“By that logic, if she wanted to die, she could kill herself over and over until she reaches the magic number.”

A beat passed before Nicky said, “It is probably best if we don’t tell her this theory.”

“Agreed.”

“I know it is illogical, but I do keep count,” Nicky continued. “As much as it is possible, I want us to stay close to one another in how often we die.”

Joe traced a line with his finger down Nicky’s chest, the skin smooth and unblemished despite how often it had been stabbed. “Yes, it would be good to try to die as little as possible.”

Nicky kissed the top of his head, burying his whole face in Joe’s hair. “I know we are young, but I fear it will never get easier to see you die. I will worry every single time that it is your last.”

Joe squeezed his lover tight, in confirmation that he felt the same.

After a decade together, Joe began drawing. Everything. He still felt like a young man, but memories are tricky, and the one looming fear of his life was that the vastness of time ahead of him would make him forget all the good he had already experienced. How fortunate he was, to be scared of eternity not because of loneliness and heartbreak and loss but because of having too many good memories to recollect. 

Nicky became exasperated with him, with how often he stopped whatever they were doing so he could draw whatever they were doing, or just draw Nicky because “you made a face I like, I need to preserve it.” Parchment was not easy to come by, but Joe was relentless in his efforts.

He drew and drew and drew, a constant as rocksteady as their love for each other.

For a period lasting nearly 50 years, neither of them died. They still fought battles, with Andy deciding when and how they would fight, but they survived each one like very lucky mortal men. It was during a skirmish with a small group of religious extremists somewhere in Europe that Nicky’s throat was cut clean across, and Joe cried out in pain so loud that Andy pulled him against her body and held him tight until he felt his heart calm. 

That was the first time he remembered feeling old. He and Nicky had been together for so long, what felt like so long, they often acted like old men. Their love deep and settled and sure, they spent many days together not even speaking, only small touches, sexless for weeks without noticing. 

But after Nicky’s throat was slit, a fire ignited in Joe, a myopic feeling of impermanence making him hungry for every touch, every kiss, every fuck. He mapped his body with his lips for several nights in a row, kissing and licking every inch of skin, opening himself up while swallowing Nicky’s cock, bringing him right to the edge with his mouth before readjusting and sinking down, riding him slowly and surely because they had all the time in the world.

And after, lying naked together, Joe scooped Nicky into his arms, back to chest, and whispered against his ear the many ways in which he loved him. 

The next time, it was Joe who died a brutal death, and it was Nicky who experienced an existential crisis that resulted in many pleasurably sleepless nights.

When they grew past the age of a normal lifespan, they began counting in decades instead of years. There was a decade of boredom. A decade of bliss, and a second, third, fourth decade of bliss. Then a decade of bickering with one another. A decade of attempted relationships with others outside of Joe, Nicky, Andy—they tried having pets, they tried making friends, they even considered finding a way to raise a child together. 

But they were outcasts, and not because of their supposed immortality. They could lie about that, could know a person for years before it became an issue, but for the other reasons. The other reasons were not so easily overlooked. Christian and Muslim, holding hands—they avoided much of Europe for many years. Progress is not linear, however, and so they could spend several years in a place where they could be themselves, only to move on to a place where they could be killed for being themselves, and this was over and over again, for hundreds of years, and in the 21st century they both finally began believing that progress was a line and not a circle only to stumble upon a small town in the American Midwest where they were refused a room at three different hotels. The decade was the 2010s.

They had never broken up. Not once in 900 years had it even come up. They needed space sometimes, sure, but the one thing they had learned from living so long is that time is not real and that a decade together can pass in a moment while three days apart can feel like a year, and so they had never spent more than a couple weeks apart from each other in 900 years.

There was longing, yearning, stretches of time where they wanted to escape the life that was chosen for them, and there were many years that they did not fight any battles, that they did not even see Andy. They both went through periods of depression, mania, and every human emotion in between, identity crises and existential dread, and sometimes the only thing tethering them to reality was the steadfast surety of their love for one another, that when all else seemed lost, they had each other. They checked on Andy a lot during their lowest moments. It was impossible to imagine how she had survived all this time without an anchor.

Living so long rattled one’s moral compass. Any hard decision, any mistake would be forgotten or would prove unimportant with the ever patient and forgiving passage of time. Hundreds of years, killing countless men, it is not possible to feel them all, to remember them all and carry the burden of all that death. No matter how many wars they fought, Joe was never fully confident that they were on the right side or that there _was_ a right side. There was always the nagging deep in his subconscious that there could be more, that they could be doing more with the time they were given, but he wasted years and years trying to figure out _what._ Once they became old enough to read about things they had lived through in history books, it seemed obvious that they should have done this, could have done that, focused more on this, ignored that, and the world would be a better place if they had just been able to see the big picture. Living through so much of the world’s history made it feel like the responsibility of the world’s trajectory was on their shoulders.

“We can only do what we can do,” Nicky would say, every time Joe had to get his jumble of thoughts out, and he somehow always had the grace to be gentle with him, even after having the same conversation hundreds of times. “We are only men, after all.”

They were not always careful, or they were not always lucky. They had been tested on by doctors, priests, scientists, witches; it was hard to keep track of all the times they had died on operating tables, only to be discarded when their secrets could not be revealed. These deaths were painful, like the others, but for some reason they made for the best sex afterward. _We are only men, after all._

When Booker was born, they began fighting smaller battles. They were for-hire for any job that seemed like the right thing to do. After Booker’s last son passed away, the four of them lived together for many years. They all four liked each other, then they hated each other, then they loved each other. There was a sadness in the set of Booker’s shoulders that time could not heal, a grief somehow heavier than the kind Andy carried. It was through Booker that they learned that grief does not compound or diminish with time, it comes and goes as it pleases. 

And then came Nile.

It hurts every time.

At beat number one hundred ninety-nine, Joe’s heart evens to a steady pace. At two hundred twelve beats, Nicky coughs his way back to life, red skin fading back to white, blue eyes blinking open.

Joe’s face splits into a grin as he looks down at his lover. “That was all my fault,” he says as a tear slips down his cheek. "I finally cook dinner for once, and you die."

Nicky reaches up and cups his jaw, fingers pressing lightly into his beard. “It’s OK, that’s the first time in several hundred years that you’ve accidentally killed me.”

“I told you, it was _Andy_ that accidentally shot you in the Revolut—”

"I know, I know." He smiles warmly up at Joe. Quietly, he says, "You're OK. I'm here."

“What are y’all doing?” 

Nicky and Joe both lift their heads at the sound of Nile's voice. Nicky sits up and leans his weight back against Joe’s chest, both of them still on the floor of the kitchen.

“Joe was waiting on me to come back to life. He poisoned my food to see what would happen.”

Joe playfully bumps his shoulder against Nicky. 

Nile raises her eyebrows at them. “Cool. Um, I was hoping I could talk to you guys for a minute.”

They help each other up and gesture to the kitchen table as they talk over each other with _of course you can talk to us, anything you need, we’re glad you came to us._

Nile sits across from them and folds her hands on the table. “You’ve been alive nearly a thousand years, right?”

They both nod.

“Do you remember what it was like? At first?” She scratches the side of her face, her eyes wide as she looks down at the table. “Because I’m 27 and I still feel 27 even though I know I’m gonna be 27 for, you know, a _really_ long time. I don’t feel old yet, and I don’t feel like I’m gonna feel old for a while. But I can’t even imagine what it’s like to live for so long, like, am I even gonna remember any of this in a couple hundred years? How do I make sure I don’t...forget?”

Joe and Nicky share a look. Nicky nods his head, silently telling Joe to get up. 

Joe excuses himself. He has some drawings to retrieve. 

**Author's Note:**

> I know some stuff in this is maybe not canonically accurate or whatever (like Nicky taking 2-3 minutes to come back to life), but I do what I want!!!!!!!!!!!!
> 
> If y'all like this, I'm planning on writing a longer Andy-centric fic probably with some similar concepts, exploring history and such, if anybody's interested in that kind of thing...
> 
> I'm [tomhardysteeth](https://tomhardysteeth.tumblr.com/) on tumblr.
> 
> [Rebloggable link](https://tomhardysteeth.tumblr.com/post/625881526278799360/counting-heartbeats)


End file.
